And three others.
It was the three others that made a peculiar situation totally bizarre. The little one that looked like a turkey didn’t actually look that much like a turkey, after all. The face didn’t belong to any kind of poultry. It was more like that of some ill-tempered tiger cub, Hilda thought. The plume that decorated its tail was almost peacock in its colorful splendor, but it wasn’t made of feathers at all. It was a display of something more like fish scales that changed color from moment to moment as its owner gazed around in displeasure.
“Colonel Morrisey?” Hilda turned swiftly when she heard her name called, and wasn’t surprised to find it was that ubiquitous junior agent, Tepp. The woman was pointing at the turkey, and her finger was shaking. “It’s Dopey!”
And, Hilda saw, yes, it was. Its picture had been part of the zoo of weirdos that had been displayed in one of those unexplained-or now beginning to be explained-lunatic messages that had arrived from space a year or two before. This was the one they called “Dopey,” all right. It was not really comical in appearance, but it wasn’t particularly scary, either . . . unlike the other two.
Those were definitely frightening to took at. They were big. The bus sagged perceptibly on its springs as they entered. And they were sure-hell ugly: fish-belly skin, multiple arms, with a white-fluff beard over the lower part of their faces that was more like foam plastic than hair. Hilda decided they were the ones called “Doc.” The Dopey-creature seemed quite at ease at being carried by one of the pale monsters. Even the six humans who had come out of the spaceship seemed to pay them little attention. The Earthbound ones in the welcoming party, though, kept a wary distance. One of the Mounties had dutifully interposed himself between the Docs and the humans, presumably in case these space monsters suddenly began ravaging and murdering, but he did not seem happy about it. And when the Dopey hopped down from the arms of his bearer and began to investigate the interior of the bus the Mounty said sharply, “Scoot! Get back there, you!”
The man was waving his arms as though at an unfamiliar, but probably not really dangerous, stray animal. Dopey peered up at him.
“But why?” he asked reasonably, and, to Hilda’s surprise, in impeccable English. “I am simply curious about this crude vehicle.”
“Get back,” the Mounty said, his tone still firm although his expression was distinctly uneasy. The little alien flicked its great spread of tail and sulkily obeyed.
All this Colonel Hilda Morrisey was observing and trying to remember in every detail. She wasn’t pleased. There should have been recording devices in place to catch every word and every movement for analysis later on. Those first few minutes after you got a suspect in custody were the most important; that was when some unguarded remark might slip out that you could pounce on later. She fretted over wasting opportunities. The sooner they got these-people-into Bureau custody, the sooner interrogation could begin.
But she couldn’t do it here. All she could do at this point was listen.
There wasn’t much to listen to. The human arrivals were obviously on the ragged edge of exhaustion. Dannerman and Dr. Pat Adcock- the real Dannerman and Pat Adcock-were trying to engage the new ones in conversation, but they were too wasted to respond much.
Except for one of the new Pats, who was looking thoughtfully from one Dannerman to another. When she caught the “real” Dannerman’s eye she smiled, got up and sat down again beside him and began a low-voiced conversation. Eavesdropping, Hilda was startled to hear the woman begin a cozy conversation- “They call me Patrice-saves confusion. Well, it saves a little of the confusion, anyway. Listen, I’m sorry about the way I look. . . .”
Hilda raised an eyebrow. That was pickup-bar talk! The woman was actually, incongruously, making a move on Dannerman! While the other Dannerman and one of the other Pats were already sound asleep in a shared seat, the man’s arm lovingly around the woman.
Horny little devils, Hilda thought wonderingly, and looked outside. The firemen were slowly trundling their trucks away, no longer necessary and a bit disappointed, while a tractor was nuzzling up to the spacecraft to haul it somewhere. The director was standing by the little ship, talking to a man in the doorway with a Bureau tag hanging from his jacket. Not far away the three ambulances were parked, with all the medics clustered around the vehicle where the old lady had been taken. As Hilda watched, that one moved off, siren blasting. A pair of the other medics came trotting over to the bus and climbed in, asking, “Anyone here need medical attention?”
The other Dannerman, roused by the sound of the sirens, looked up. Yawning, he pointed to one of the other Pats. “Better check Pat Five over. She’s pregnant.”
The real Pat Adcock gasped. Hilda stared at the new Dannerman. “You dog,” she said, half-admiringly.
He gave her a weary shake of the head. “It wasn’t me that done it, Hilda,” he said. “But that’s a really long story.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The situation wasn’t that Pat Adcock-the real Pat Adcock, or so she couldn’t help thinking of herself-had nothing to say to these three new selves. It was the other way around. She had too much. She had so many questions to ask and so many things she needed to express that she didn’t know where to begin.
The real shocker was that one of her was actually getting ready to have a baby. That took a lot of getting used to. Pat Adcock had never been pregnant, had never really wanted to be-oh, sure, maybe now and then there had been a fleeting wistful notion, quickly gone away. Who had the time for bringing up a child? So now she sat mute in the bus while they waited to be told what to do, then stood mute in the doorway of the deputy director’s plane while the D.D. and five or six others wrangled over Jimmy Lin. This Jimmy Lin. The one who had just returned from somewhere in space. The one who now was adamantly refusing to go anywhere at all until he had a chance to talk to the Chinese consul in Vancouver. The one, most amazingly of all, who turned out to be the father of this other Pat’s child.
That was really hard to believe.
Down on the ground voices were raised in anger. The argument seemed to be between the deputy director and the RCMP officer, and the deputy director was losing. The Mountie was shaking his head firmly. Significantly, a dozen other Mounties were standing silently behind him.
Clearly the deputy director didn’t want a major confrontation. He turned and stormed up the steps. “Canadian bastards,” he was muttering. “First they take the old lady away from us, now it’s the Chinese. Well, it isn’t worth a war.” More loudly, to the people in the doorway: “Get your asses on board. We’re going home.”
As soon as they were airborne it started. The agents unstrapped themselves, heedless of the fact that the “Fasten Seat Belts” lights were still on. Colonel Morrisey reseated herself at a little desk by a window and pulled out a keypad. She tapped swiftly, then nodded to the other spook. “Recording has commenced,” she said.
“Right,” said the other female spook. “I’m Vice Deputy Director Daisy Fennell. I don’t think we met before, because I flew in on the director’s plane, but now I need to ask you some questions. You first, Agent Dannerman-“ turning to the Dannerman with the beard. “I want you to begin at the beginning, starting with your launch to the Starlab satellite-“
But the new Dannerman was shaking his head. “First we have to eat,” he said.
The vice deputy raised her voice and lowered its temperature. “Agent Dannerman,” she began frostily, “you will do as I-“
He stood his ground. “Have a heart! You don’t know how it is with us. We’ve been eating crap for months and we are damn starved.”
The vice deputy opened her mouth to speak again, but Colonel Morrisey stood up quickly. She murmured something to the other woman, then said, “I’ll take care of that. But you start talking while you’re waiting for the food, Danno.”
“That’ll be fine,” he said, “if it’s not too long.” The look Hilda Morrisey gave him as she left was reproachful, but also amused, Pat thought.
“Begin,” the older woman commanded. “You approached the satellite in orbit.”
Dannerman nodded. “The first thing we saw was that there was some kind of blister on the side of the satellite that didn’t belong there, and-“
Pat couldn’t help herself. “But we didn’t! I was looking for it; I’d seen it on the remote, and it just wasn’t there.”